When you're heavily into a gaming session you can't always check in on the status of your hardware or mess with settings. That's where the new Power-Grid app comes in. With the connector app, you can control your PC and pipe system stats in real time over to your iPhone or Android device.

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So maybe you've got a killer gaming PC with SLI video cards and a giant 30-inch monitor packing more pixels than the eye can discern, but what if you need to skip a track in your background music player? When you're heavily into a gaming session you can't always check in on the status of your hardware or mess with settings. That's where the new Power-Grid app comes in. With the connector app, you can control your PC and pipe system stats in real time over to your iPhone or Android device.

The desktop app (Windows 7 and 8 only) runs in the background and connects instantly over your local network to the app. The desktop client itself displays various system stats, but most of the magic happens on the app side.

There are four tabs in the app, with the first one being perhaps the most appealing to hardware nerds. You can see your CPU activity broken down by core, processes, and total CPU load. Below that there are similarly elaborate graphs depicting RAM, network usage, and hard drive space (on all your connected drives). This is useful stuff if you're looking to keep an eye on your system performance while gaming.

There is also a sound control tab that lets you adjust the mic or system volume. It even breaks down volume into individual apps. Music playback on the PC can be controlled from this tab in the app too. The Incoming center is a place to put RSS feeds or social networking updates, but I'm not so sure this makes a lot of sense--there are dedicated apps that do this better.

These are just the default tabs, though. With the desktop connector client you can configure the tabs in the app by adding new ones and removing the ones you don't need. Power-Grid has various Windows shortcut buttons, a calculator, and more. The Power-Grid site has additional layouts you can get for specific apps. You can get grids for Minecraft, Office, VLC, Team Fortress 2, and more.

You can run up to four tabs for free, with more available via an in-app purchase. The overall UI is a little too skeuomorphic, but it's responsive and functional. It's worth checking out for all members of the PC gaming master race.

Ryan Whitwam is a freelance tech/science writer and fan of all things electronic. This long-time skeptic and former research scientist is a lover of the em dash and a defender of the Oxford comma. He also writes for Geek.com and ExtremeTech.
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